It is difficult, if not impossible, to know the extent to which the person with whom you are speaking about a book is lying about having read it. Not only because there is hardly another domain in which such pronounced hypocrisy holds sway, but above all because each speaker cannot possibly know the other person's history with the book and they are thus deluding themselves if they think they can answer the question.

Such a conversation amounts to a game of dupes, in which the participants fool themselves even before fooling others, and in which their memories of books will be marked by the stakes of the situation at hand. It would, after all, be a misunderstanding of the act of reading to try to separate those who have read a certain book and those who are ignorant of it into two camps, as Lodge's professor [from Changing Places] foolishly tried to do. It is a misunderstanding both by so-called readers, who disregard the erasure and loss that accompanies every act of reading, and so-called non-readers, who ignore the creative impulse that can arise from every encounter with a book.

To liberate ourselves from the idea that the Other knows whether we're lying—the Other being just as much ourselves—is thus one of the primary conditions for being able to talk about books with grace, whether we've read them or not. In truth, of course, the knowledge at stake in our comments on books is intrinsically uncertain. And the Other, meanwhile, is a disapproving image of ourselves that we project onto our listeners, an image we have internalized based on a culture so exhaustive, and whose importance is so firmly drummed into us in school, that it impedes us from living and thinking.

-- Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (tr. Jeffrey Mehlman)